Longtime peace advocate hails cluster bomb

By Tim ShenkAKRON, Pa. -- Longtime peace advocate Titus Peachey said he is amazedand pleased that 111 countries formally agreed to adopt a ban oncluster bombs at a recent international conference that he attendedin Dublin, Ireland.Peachey, director of peace education for Mennonite Central Committee(MCC) U.S., said that the ban is a great step toward ending the useof a weapon that kills civilians in former war zones."After working at this for 28 years, to actually be at a place wheregovernments are ready to ban these things is really amazing," Peacheysaid.However, many nations that use cluster bombs did not agree to theban, including the United States, Russia, China and Israel, Peacheysaid. He adds that the United States did not send a representative tothe conference and reportedly lobbied behind the scenes against thetreaty. Canada agreed to the ban.Cluster bombs are aerial weapons that release up to several hundredsubmunitions, or "bombies," over a wide area. Peachey and otheradvocates have long called for a ban on cluster bombs because theykill indiscriminately. In many cases, the bombies fail to explode onimpact and are accidentally detonated by civilians years later.Titus Peachey and his wife Linda Gehman Peachey started raisingawareness about cluster bombs when they served as MCC workers in Laosin the early 1980s. The U.S. military dropped an estimated 260million bombies on Laos during the Vietnam War, and a significantportion did not detonate on impact, Peachey said.In the decades since they were dropped, the unexploded bombies havecontinued to kill and maim many people in rural Laos, Peachey said.When the Peacheys returned to the United States, they brought backthe broken head of a garden hoe -- a simple tool that had detonated a
bombie in the soil, killing a mother of 11 children."I always felt at that time that we had a very special responsibilityto do something about this because we are U.S. citizens and, asMennonites, we are committed to Christ's way of peace andnonviolence," Peachey said.Peachey and Virgil Wiebe, an international law consultant for MCC,attended a series of international conferences on banning clusterbombs and other explosive remnants of war. In 2003, MCC helped foundthe Cluster Munitions Coalition, an international partnership ofhumanitarian organizations that has played a key role in advocatingfor the ban, Peachey said.In 2007, MCC helped a Lebanese optician, Raed Mokaled, visit theUnited States to tell the story of his 5-year-old son Ahmad, who waskilled by a cluster bomb submunition in 1999.Mokaled was one of many people who traveled to the Dublin conferenceto share their tragic experiences with cluster bombs. Others camefrom countries including Iraq, Serbia, Tajikistan, Cambodia and Vietnam."We got a strong treaty, and it's a big step," Mokaled said at theconclusion of the conference. "My son -- he rests now in his gravebecause we got a treaty."Tim Shenk is a writer for Mennonite Central Committee.